Matters of Time, or the Tender Politics of Permeability
On Nour Jaouda and the installation 'Matters of featuring The Iris Grows on Both Sides of the Fence'
When Naso Art Journal encountered the installation in person at Art Basel Qatar 2026, the editorial instinct was not to interpret immediately but to decelerate. Rather than framing the work through commentary, we chose to foreground it, to give our readers the same temporal space the installation itself demands. Nour Jaouda’s Matters of Time does not reward instant comprehension; it unfolds through duration. Its dyes settle slowly into fabric just as perception settles slowly into understanding. The work proposes that meaning is not delivered but accumulated - that looking, like staining, is a gradual absorption. Our role, therefore, became less that of explanation and more that of pacing: to hold the encounter open long enough for time, the work’s true medium, to reach the reader.
'Matters of featuring The Iris Grows on Both Sides of the Fence' (Spike Island, Bristol, 2025)
Perhaps the most radical element of Matters of Time is its refusal of hardness: visually, materially, conceptually. The textiles hang with gravity, not rigidity. The imagery dissolves at its edges. Even the palette - mineral blues, earthen browns, subdued greens - operates in gradients rather than contrasts.
This softness is not aesthetic fragility; it is structural intelligence. The work suggests that resilience may lie not in resistance but in adaptability. Pigment spreads because fiber allows it. Fabric moves because air touches it. The installation survives through responsiveness.
Jaouda’s practice shifts time from subject to material. The dyes permeate fiber gradually, allowing absorption to replace gesture. There is no visible stroke, no theatrical mark of authorship. Instead, color seeps, settles, and stabilizes over hours, perhaps days. This distinction is not technical but philosophical. In much of contemporary art, immediacy signals relevance. Here, slowness becomes the argument. The work proposes that meaning emerges not through assertion but through sedimentation. To stand before the textiles is to follow the record of their making, reading each tonal shift as evidence of the time the material has held.
Nour Jaouda is a Libyan artist based between London and Cairo.
Nour Jaouda fuses life and aesthetic practice through her continual movements between places real and remembered. Through earthy, saturated colors and the fiber medium, Jaouda explores tensions such as closeness and distance, presence and absence, and fragmentation and reconstruction. The simultaneous experiences of rooting, as a process, and being rootless imbue her work with conceptual, sensory dimensions. Whether evoking the uprooting or replanting of the self, Jaouda’s textiles embed the fluidity of identity and a constant state of becoming... Threading her works are notions of rootlessness and resilience, destruction and regeneration, and timelessness. Jaouda relishes in the slow, physical and felt processes of fabricating hand-dyed textiles. Their inherent connectivity begets their association with the eternal and divine; to the artist, textiles have no beginning or end. The vegetal dyes possess their own force and unpredictability to activate the work. Jaouda’s sumptuously layered fabrics reverberate with colors at once deep and ethereal, shadowy and luminescent, as infinitely textured as memory itself.
Text by Jessica Gerschultz. Courtesy of artist.
Images by Naso Art Journal. Written and Edited by Soraya. Copyright of Naso Art Journal.
